Related papers: The Causal Information Bottleneck and Optimal Caus…

Vision-language pretrained models have seen remarkable success, but their application to safety-critical settings is limited by their lack of interpretability. To improve the interpretability of vision-language models such as CLIP, we…

The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a widely used way to estimate the causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data with latent confounders. A standard IV is expected to be related to the treatment…

Most existing debiasing methods for multimodal models, including causal intervention and inference methods, utilize approximate heuristics to represent the biases, such as shallow features from early stages of training or unimodal features…

We present a simple case study, demonstrating that Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) can improve a network's classification calibration as well as its ability to detect out-of-distribution data. Without explicitly being designed to…

Making decisions in complex environments is a key challenge in artificial intelligence (AI). Situations involving multiple decision makers are particularly complex, leading to computational intractability of principled solution methods. A…

We introduce structural causal bottleneck models (SCBMs), a novel class of structural causal models. At the core of SCBMs lies the assumption that causal effects between high-dimensional variables only depend on low-dimensional summary…

Machine learning is a vital part of many real-world systems, but several concerns remain about the lack of interpretability, explainability and robustness of black-box AI systems. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) address some of these…

Variational dimensionality reduction methods are widely used for their accuracy, generative capabilities, and robustness. We introduce a unifying framework that generalizes both such as traditional and state-of-the-art methods. The…

Causal discovery and causal reasoning are classically treated as separate and consecutive tasks: one first infers the causal graph, and then uses it to estimate causal effects of interventions. However, such a two-stage approach is…

Identifying the causal variables of an environment and how to intervene on them is of core value in applications such as robotics and embodied AI. While an agent can commonly interact with the environment and may implicitly perturb the…

Instrumental variables (IVs) are crucial for addressing unobservable confounders, yet their stringent exogeneity assumptions pose significant challenges in networked data. Existing methods typically rely on modelling neighbour information…

We present a categorical framework for relating causal models that represent the same system at different levels of abstraction. We define a causal abstraction as natural transformations between appropriate Markov functors, which concisely…

Causal disentanglement aims to uncover a representation of data using latent variables that are interrelated through a causal model. Such a representation is identifiable if the latent model that explains the data is unique. In this paper,…

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to deliver interpretable predictions by routing decisions through a human-understandable concept layer, yet they often suffer reduced accuracy and concept leakage that undermines faithfulness. We…

We introduce a bottleneck method for learning data representations based on information deficiency, rather than the more traditional information sufficiency. A variational upper bound allows us to implement this method efficiently. The…

Understanding the source of the superior generalization ability of NNs remains one of the most important problems in ML research. There have been a series of theoretical works trying to derive non-vacuous bounds for NNs. Recently, the…

Collaborative perception systems leverage multiple edge devices, such surveillance cameras or autonomous cars, to enhance sensing quality and eliminate blind spots. Despite their advantages, challenges such as limited channel capacity and…

In this paper, a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for the problem of obtaining task-relevant, multi-resolution, graph abstractions for resource-constrained agents is presented. The formulation leverages concepts from…

Contrastive learning (CL) has shown great power in self-supervised learning due to its ability to capture insight correlations among large-scale data. Current CL models are biased to learn only the ability to discriminate positive and…

Causality lays the foundation for the trajectory of our world. Causal inference (CI), which aims to infer intrinsic causal relations among variables of interest, has emerged as a crucial research topic. Nevertheless, the lack of observation…